If you google Swiss design, you will probably get a lot of results about “The Swiss Style,” and you will be left thinking that for all that Swiss graphic design did and achieved, it is only one specific style period. This is because the Swiss Style–– also known as the International Style–– is the most well-known period within Swiss graphic design. While the naming of this website was inspired by that, the idea was mostly to underscore how the Swiss Style cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration all the other styles, periods, changes, innovations, ideas, techniques, and perspectives that comprise the history of Swiss graphic design.

While there are many resources available for anyone to look at pictures of Swiss posters–– take a look at the More Resources page!–– and learning general information about them, such as who designed them, when, and what their measurements are, it is slightly more difficult to 1) find information about other Swiss design periods; and 2) make connections between design schools, designers, and design innovations. As such, creating a network visualization tackled those two concerns that were the driving force behind this project: by featuring an easily comprehensible and visually appealing digital method that comprised a lot of information in a highly interactive way, Swiss design could be made more entertaining, fun, and alluring to anyone. In a way, the overall goal of this project was to make Swiss graphic design more accessible.

While this is just a prototype, we welcome any questions or concerns you might have. So please, do not hesitate to reach out! 

Emma Tienda
M.A. Material Culture & Public Humanities

In the Summer of 2024, I had the opportunity to intern at Virginia Tech’s Art & Architecture Library, cataloguing processing the donations from the Swiss Poster Collection. Since there is no university website dedicated to this amazing resource, I decided to use it for my final assignment for Dr. Gitre’s Digital History Methods. However, instead of doing a regular database, and given that there is still ongoing work planned for the collection, I came up with the idea to build something more interactive and that could attempt to explain the basics of Swiss design. 

Also, and in case you are wondering, all the fonts used here are Helvetica (if you want to know why this is relevant, look for Helvetica’s entry in the Network Visualization) and the color palette is uniform throughout the website and the network. The color palette is meant to be slightly reminiscent of a Swiss style poster with bold, straight-cut, black lettering, and a contrasting, lively color.